Blazing Strike review

There is a heck of a lot to like about Blazing Strike. I was enticed by its wares a few months ago when an advert on the back of my monthly pro wrestling magazine caught my eye. The promo art style is evocative of the golden age of Neo Geo fighters, whilst the in-game sprite-work is more than a little Third Strike-y. It has a genuinely interesting cast of combatants that aren’t simply copycats of the usual stereotypes, and make you want to experiment with all of them. All the signs point toward this being very much the kind of thing that would have had me saving up my pocket money as a youngster. But most remarkable of all, Blazing Strike is the work of just one person.

A fighter stands or falls by its characters and their combat system, and Blazing Strike has a rather unique take. It is clear that the focus has been placed on making it easy to master for casual players, as the inputs are easy to pick up, and there are just four attack buttons to worry about, just like the Neo arcade games that it is inspired by. There are 14 heroes to choose from initially, with two unlockables available once you beat Arcade and Story mode. The roster does represent familiar fighting archetypes, but has some genuinely ace design choices.

Alexander is the huge grappling wrestler, Pink is a sassy cyberpunk with a rangy bladed weapon, and Jake and Shunsuke are the Blazing Strike equivalents of the shoto boys from Street Fighter, without seeming like lazy retreads. The animation is smooth and visually impressive, and I loved the huge character sprites and how much charisma they have. The backgrounds are pretty good too, although some have some weird, almost incongruent design choices, with the desert area most guilty with a particularly ugly sprite looming from the backdrop.

As well designed as they may be, the fighters don’t really have enough specials or unique attacks, and even the super arts don’t feel weighty and satisfying enough. I have been playing a hell of a lot of Street Fighter 6 recently, and still don’t feel like I am even 30% in terms of learning all of the attacking possibilities from its characters. I am not asking for a level of complexity to rival that behemoth, however Blazing Strike struggles in comparison to games that were released thirty years ago, and is just too basic.

The big gimmick that Blazing Strike attempts to meld into the action is the use of a rush feature, where you hold the right trigger to advance or retreat at pace, something that can be used to add some extra mustard onto combos and specific moves, and to evade attacks. The problem is, you deplete the gauge attached to this mechanic pretty quickly, and one you do your character is penalised with a dizzy state that requires a joystick waggle to emerge from, but then the bar is instantly replenished in full. It doesn’t add enough risk/reward to the already quite limited battle system to be a worthwhile inclusion, and reminded me of a similar function in Mortal Kombat 3 which was widely criticised at the time.

On booting Blazing Strike up, I did what I always do with a fighter I am unfamiliar with and looked for a tutorial, but this was a fruitless search. There is a training mode and this allows you to practise moves, with options to show hitboxes and button inputs. There is a well-illustrated comic book-style story mode which mixes things up by having the player take on battles with different characters as it progresses. And lo and behold, here is the Tutorial, buried away and not accessible elsewhere, which is a very strange decision.

The whole game features quite dull CPU AI across the board, with an almost comical lack of challenge. The arcade mode is also nearly ruined by the in-stage hazards which cannot be switched off. In a prison-based level, you can be grabbed and held by the legs if you stray too far towards the edge of the arena, whilst other stages can see you get thwacked by a moving crane, or blown around by OTT environmental weather effects. If this was all linked into an “Extreme Battle” style standalone mode, I could live with it, but as standard it made me not want to play Arcade again once I had unlocked the hidden character.

After my time spent with it, Blazing Strike began to remind me of a quite specific issue that plagued me back in the early 1990s. Whilst I owned consoles, my main squeeze for a long time was the Commodore Amiga. And by jove, that is not a good platform for fighting games. The conversions of Japanese developed titles were dreadful, and even the very best Western-made efforts felt slightly…off.

And this is how Blazing Strike feels. But, just like Shadow Fighter, that rare beacon of hope for the 16-bit micro, there are still some good times to be had with it. You have to tip your hat to the time and love for the genre that the developer has imbued into the game, it is clear that he knows his fighting onions, and has a lot to give to the community. It is fun trying all of these wonderful, diverse characters and as with most titles in the genre it is fun to play against others, with a stable rollback netcode for online action, but I just suspect that this could have done with a decent bit of extra time to iron out some of the flaws.